Chu to SF retirement board — impact on fossil-fuel divestment unknown

Former Mayor Willie Brown, (left) greets the soon to be new city officials as Mayor Ed Lee prepares to swear in Katy Tang, (center) as San Francisco Supervisor for District 4 and Carmen Chu, (right) as Assessor-Recorder at San Francisco City Hall on Wednesday Feb. 27, 2013.

Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle

San Francisco Assessor-Recorder Carmen Chu is expected to join the board of the $23 billion San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System following a round of commission personnel shuffling initiated by Mayor Mark Farrell.

Chu would fill a seat on the retirement board vacated by Victor Makras, whom Farrell nominated to the San Francisco Port Commission. Farrell also nominated Gail Gilman to the Port Commission. Gilman is CEO of the Community Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that develops and manages housing for formerly homeless people.

Makras would replace former Port Commission member Eleni Kounalakis, who stepped down last year to run for lieutenant governor. Gilman would replace Leslie Katz, whose term expires in May.

Farrell’s nominations require the approval of the Board of Supervisors. But Makras’ potential move to the port raises questions about the future of the fledgling effort to get the retirement board to sell off its $559 million stake in fossil fuel companies.

Chu couldn’t be reached for comment, but she has given a glimpse of her attitude toward divestment in the past. She was a supervisor in 2013 when the board cast a unanimous vote on a resolution urging the retirement system to unload its fossil fuel stocks.

Makras was perhaps the most vocal member of the retirement board calling for fossil fuel divestment, largely on the grounds that fossil fuel stocks have not performed well over the past decade. The divestment movement has strong support among many SFERS retirees and environmental activists who see the retirement system’s fossil fuel holdings as a tacit endorsement of the industry’s contributions to climate change.

“I’m honored that the mayor would seek me out to go to the port,” he said. “I’m confident we will increase its revenue and run it more effectively over the years.”

— Dominic Fracassa

Security patch: San Francisco officials have been quietly scrambling since early February to patch a security vulnerability in the city’s outdoor alert system that, if left unaddressed, could have allowed hackers to seize control of the city’s network of 114 emergency sirens.

On Thursday, the Department of Technology announced that the problem had been fixed. The city says it intends to share what it learned about the issue with other city governments that rely on identical or similar outdoor siren warning systems.

“This upgrade increases the security of a piece of the public safety system in use citywide,” LindaGerull, executive director of the Department of Technology, said in a statement.

In San Francisco, the sirens are tested every Tuesday at noon. In the event of an actual emergency, the sirens blare in 15-second intervals for five minutes.

The technology department declined to share the specifics of the vulnerability, other than to say that it had to do with how electronic signals were being encrypted as they were being relayed across the alert system.

Cities have had their emergency siren systems hacked in the past. Last year, residents of Dallas were briefly sent into a panic after all of the city’s 156 emergency sirens were activated by hackers. Local reports indicated that the sirens began bellowing at 11:40 p.m. on a Friday and didn’t relent until 1:20 a.m. the next day.

Dominic Fracassa covers San Francisco City Hall for The Chronicle. He previously worked as a reporter and editor for the Daily Journal, a legal affairs newspaper. He started in news in his home state of Michigan, where he worked as a news director of 103.9 WLEN.